The sisters, light and dark, rain and shine. Corene, blunt cut burnt sienna and poems about midnight. Dawn, wavy and feathered, as blonde and buoyant as the day’s first glow. The scent of cinnamon and oranges. Corene would wander into the woods for solitude, spend all of Saturday in the library to avoid birthday parties and team sports. Dawn was a magnet, a hub, warm, loved everyone, stacked up a few dozen Valentines every winter. One sister does gold highlights, pastel blouses, a quick peach gloss over lids and mouth. The other has lips like a cardinal and holes everywhere for hardware. Dawn is married to her teenage sweetheart, takes her three flaxen-tressed boys to a big box church with drums and hands lifted in the air. Corene was an atheist for a long time, and is usually still wasted on Sunday mornings. She has no children and her husband is dead. Today Dawn is flipping flapjacks for a choir. Still in capri pajamas. Corene rinses the blueberries, slices up bananas. Dawn does not understand her sister’s paintings, but even so, her room is covered in them. Corene does not get new country, but she is bobbing along to the heartache as she drizzles the pancakes in nutmeg and maple. It was an impossible promise, to never be divided, but they have kept it since tweenage pinkie swear. They are refuge and sanctuary. You’ll never be friends, Mother used to say, in that trademark singsong taunt of hers, because your Father’s traitor juice runs through your veins. And they both saw right through it then and there, knew that his blood was the glue.